Overview

Can you have too much music?

Portable MP3 players offer the ability to effortlessly and rapidly take music from your desktop PC anywhere you want. Whereas technologies such as MiniDisc and CD-R Discmans require some pre-mastering and planning to create new mixes, MP3 players allowed music to be directly transferred from the HD. The first portable MP3 players such as the Diamond Rio 300 and Creative Labs Nomad used flash cards, utilizing solid state memory to store music. While memory cards allowed skip-proof playback, the prohibitive cost of large capacity flash cards, meant that most MP3 players only had 32 or 64MB of memory, or 30 to 60 minutes of good quality MP3s. What do you do if you want to take your entire music collection with you, wherever you go? Upgrades to 128MB could cost as much (or more than) the player itself! Creative Labs has offered one answer to this question: the Nomad Jukebox.

The Nomad Jukebox

This isn't an ordinary unit

Instead of using memory cards or even CD-Rs, the Nomad Jukebox uses a 6 gigabyte laptop 2.5" hard drive. This provides enough space for about 150 CDs of music. For many of us, even this is not enough space to store all our MP3s (of CDs we own). Recognizing this, NomadJukebox.NET (not affiliated with Creative Labs) has come up with a 20GB and 30GB aftermarket upgrade which we will also review today. Is the Nomad Jukebox the solution to all your MP3 problems or should you look for a cheap laptop? How were the aftermarket upgrades? Since rhetorical questions are a favorite technique for lazy writers, read on to find out!